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Thursday, September 27, 2018

All Quiet on the Western Front

This is a prequel of sorts to James
Hayward's “Myths and Legends of the Second World War”. The book discusses
various urban legends, propaganda lies and misconceptions arising in Britain
during World War I. Some may have altered the course of the war.

Thus, the author discusses the so-called rape of
Belgium. While the German military did carry out systematic atrocities in
occupied Belgium, these were equally systematically exaggerated by British war
propaganda. One purpose was to “sell” the war effort to an American audience.
The entry of the United States into the war decisively tipped the scales in
Allied favor. It's interesting to note that the Germans accused the *Belgians*
of pretty much the same atrocities as the British attributed to the Germans!
According to German war propaganda, the Belgian resistance movement constantly
broke the rules of war by brutal sneak attacks on German troops. Weirdly, the
Germans didn't deny their harsh reprisals – apparently, they somehow hoped that
publishing them would break the Belgian-Allied will to resistance (and somehow
persuade neutral nations that Germany was simply following the rules of
engagement). Naturally, the end result was the exact opposite…

More sinisterly, there was the bizarre propaganda lie
about the German “corpse rendering factory”, according to which the bodies of
dead German soldiers were turned into soap, fertilizer and nitroglycerine at a
secretive facility somewhere in the Reich. It's possible that this lie was
originally intended for Chinese consumption, since the Chinese would consider
such practices extraordinarily horrid due to their ancestor worship (China
didn't join the Allies until at a late stage in the war). However, the lie
seems to have had its greatest effect in Europe and the United States. It's
long-term consequences are hard to estimate – did the British disbelieve
initial reports about the Holocaust during World War II after recalling the
lies about the German “Kadaver” factory in World War I? The author doesn't
mention it, but there is an old lie about the Nazis turning dead Jews into, you
guessed it, soap…

Other myths and legends discussed by the author border
the entertaining and the farcical, such as Noel Pemberton Billing's attacks on
a supposed “homosexual conspiracy” made in Germany threatening the lifeblood of
the British nation. Still others are more on the supernatural or paranormal
side, such as the Comrade in White, often identified with Jesus Christ. There
are intriguing similarities between these stories and those of near-death
experiences (which I happen to believe are in some sense “real”). Of course,
demons also intervened in the trenches, naturally helping the Germans. Here
again, there seems to be interesting similarities with Men in Black and similar
phenomena. Needless to say, the author is a hard-line skeptic and rejects all
these manifestations as so much bunk. The Angels of Mons, the most well known
World War I legend, is extensively discussed in one section.

Finally, Hayward discusses various misconceptions about
the conduct of the war itself. Interestingly, he exonerates the British
military from most accusations – in his book on World War II, by contrast, it
seems as if Old Blighty can never do anything right (reading that book, I
sometimes wondered which side Hayward is really on…).